In this interview with the ECPS, Associate Professor Andrés Mejía Acosta (University of Notre Dame, Keough School of Global Affairs) explains why populist leaders often weaken state capacity strategically rather than accidentally. For populists, he argues, “state institutions and agencies get in the way of a more unilateral, discretionary, non-democratic type of governance,” prompting efforts to “ignore, dismantle, bypass, or merge” oversight bodies that constrain executive power. Assoc. Prof. Acosta underscores the asymmetry between construction and destruction: “state building… takes decades and even centuries,” yet “state dismantling… can be done very quickly,” with lasting effects on democratic recovery. He links institutional erosion to patronage politics, discretionary spending, and the weakening of accountability networks—dynamics that make reversals of democratic backsliding harder when “state mechanisms are no longer functioning.”
Interview by Selcuk Gultasli
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Andrés Mejía Acosta, Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, offers a sobering analytical framework for understanding how contemporary populist governance erodes state capacity and, in turn, weakens democratic resilience. Anchored in his influential research on “state hollowing,” Assoc. Prof. Acosta argues that the weakening of bureaucratic institutions is not an accidental byproduct of populist rule but a deliberate governing strategy. For populist leaders, he explains, “state institutions and agencies get in the way of a more unilateral, discretionary, non-democratic type of governance,” making their dismantling instrumental to consolidating power.
Highlighting the core theme captured in the interview’s title, Assoc. Prof. Acosta stresses the asymmetry between the slow construction and rapid destruction of state institutions. While comparative politics has long recognized the difficulty of building capable states, he warns that their erosion can occur with alarming speed and lasting consequences: “In the case of state building, we have long understood that it takes decades and even centuries to build and strengthen states, but we are now learning that state dismantling apparently does not take long; it can be done very quickly.” This accelerated dismantling, he argues, produces durable institutional damage that outlives the populist incumbents themselves, making democratic recovery far more difficult. Once oversight agencies, regulatory bodies, and accountability mechanisms are weakened or eliminated, the very infrastructure required for democratic renewal may no longer function.
Throughout the conversation, Assoc. Prof. Acosta situates state erosion within the broader literature on democratic backsliding while distinguishing it from classical authoritarian consolidation. Whereas backsliding targets elections, media freedom, and political competition, state hollowing undermines the administrative and fiscal capacities that sustain governance itself. The result is a mutually reinforcing cycle: weakening representative institutions enables further bureaucratic dismantling, while eroding state capacity deactivates democratic safeguards. As he notes, this dynamic creates long-term structural damage: “This phenomenon of state erosion will have long-term consequences that make reversals of democratic backsliding more difficult. It will be harder to recover democratic practices when state mechanisms are no longer functioning.”
Drawing on empirical examples from Latin America and beyond, Assoc. Prof. Acosta also emphasizes how populist regimes selectively weaken oversight institutions while expanding discretionary spending, coercive apparatuses, and patronage networks. Agencies responsible for environmental regulation, poverty evaluation, or fiscal monitoring become targets precisely because they constrain executive discretion. In their place emerges a governance model characterized by informality, opacity, and clientelistic redistribution—conditions that entrench incumbents while undermining public accountability.
Yet the interview is not solely diagnostic. Assoc. Prof. Acosta concludes with cautious optimism about democratic resilience, underscoring the need for cross-sectoral coalitions, institutional reforms, and sustained civic mobilization. As authoritarian tendencies penetrate deeper into governance structures—“as if the authoritarian illness is spreading through the body”—he calls for a global effort to rebuild the institutional foundations of democracy.
Taken together, this interview provides a theoretically rich and empirically grounded account of how populist leaders hollow out states from within—and why the consequences for democracy may endure long after the political moment has passed.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Associate Professor Andrés Mejía Acosta:, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
Populists Dismantle State Capacity to Enable Unilateral Rule
Photo: Jolanta Wojcicka.
Professor Andres Acosta, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: In your article “Why populists hollow out their states?”, you argue that populist leaders often weaken state capacity not accidentally but strategically. Could you elaborate on the causal mechanisms through which populist governance transforms capable bureaucracies into politicized instruments of rule?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: Thank you, Selcuk. I welcome this opportunity to speak more about our article, and I am pleased to share this space with you. With regard to your question, the starting premise is that for populists, state institutions and agencies get in the way of a more unilateral, discretionary, non-democratic type of governance. So, the dismantling or weakening of state capacities is, we argue, a strategy to accomplish these goals.
If you think of different examples of state functions, such as environmental regulation or poverty alleviation programs—their implementation and evaluation—or the role that labor health statistics play in the running of government operations, these would be relatively inconvenient if what populist leaders want is to maximize the extractive sector, use poverty alleviation programs for clientelistic purposes, or misreport what labor health statistics indicate. The strategy, therefore, is to ignore, dismantle, bypass, or merge the institutions in charge of these functions.
For example, we cite the case of Mexico, where one of the most renowned and influential agencies evaluating poverty and deprivation programs, CONEVAL, was first weakened, its funding conditioned, and eventually dismantled. This aligns with the goal of delivering poverty reduction programs that are not accountable, measurable, or verifiable. It is consistent with the logic of removing institutions that stand in the way of achieving other objectives.
States Take Decades, Centuries to Build, and Can Be Dismantled in Years
Your work suggests that state erosion under populism involves both institutional capture and the reconfiguration of accountability networks. How do these processes differ from classic forms of authoritarian consolidation studied in comparative politics?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: Yes, one clarification we make from the beginning is that our work is different from, and we are not trying to understand, full forms of autocratic regimes such as those in Russia or China, but rather the dismantling of the democratic state. These are parallel but distinct processes, and it is probably more useful to follow the line of work on democratic backsliding. Both state dismantling and democratic backsliding aim to capture representative institutions and undermine accountability.
The key difference, we argue, is that state erosion is a much more long-term and hard-to-reverse trend. For example, I could elaborate on whether state erosion is a cause or an effect of democratic backsliding, but one thing we can see is that there is extensive literature discussing whether democratic erosion can in fact be reversed and what kinds of institutional reforms or changes are necessary. In the case of state building, we have long understood that it takes decades and even centuries to build and strengthen states, but we are now learning that state dismantling apparently does not take long; it can be done very quickly.
To what extent is the hollowing-out of the state driven by populists’ need to sustain patronage-based coalitions rather than by ideological hostility to liberal institutions?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: They are complementary, I would say. On the one hand, there is ideological hostility to liberal institutions, and we see the discourse of populists going against these liberal—or what they call “woke”—institutions that preserve individual rights, minority representation, etc.
With that in mind, they build clientelistic coalitions to use or manipulate the state for their own private purposes. One example could be the dismantling of aid agencies, where it is argued that it is not a priority for a country to aid others, thereby undermining the rules-based institutional order, whether in democratic promotion, sustainable energy, or the maintenance of democratic practices. Instead, they shift the discourse and government energy toward arming and strengthening defense budgets.
It becomes problematic when this shift toward securitization, defense, or intelligence is built around sustaining patronage-based coalitions. This reflects a move away from the liberal order in order to justify a turn toward patronage-based politics.
State Erosion and Democratic Backsliding Reinforce Each Other
How does populist state erosion interact with democratic backsliding? Is institutional weakening a precondition for autocratization, or can it emerge as a consequence of already declining democratic norms?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: This is a very good question, and they are interactive but distinct. We have reflected on this, and more empirical work needs to be developed to demonstrate it. But what we are saying is that undermining representative institutions—so, in the democratic backsliding literature, when you weaken elections, intimidate political parties, or undermine freedom of expression—these are democratic attacks that open the way for further state erosion in the manner I described earlier: merging state agencies, ignoring state agencies, dismantling budgets, the bureaucracy, etc.
This is possible when there is less popular freedom or citizens’ freedom to contest, protest, defend, and demand accountability for why these agencies are being undermined. So, certainly, weakening democratic institutions facilitates the dismantling of the state.
But the arrow also goes in the opposite direction: when state institutions erode, such as through compromising the tenure or funding of the judiciary, democratic safeguards are deactivated. If the courts and the judicial system are compromised, accused of corruption, or lack the necessary funding or technocratic expertise, how can they uphold basic democratic values? So, it is a two-way street, in a sense, and one of the issues we are examining more closely is the extent to which there is irreversible damage—how far state erosion produces longer-term harm to the future defense of democracy.
What we argue, therefore, is that this phenomenon of state erosion will have long-term consequences that make reversals of democratic backsliding more difficult. It will be harder to recover democratic practices when state mechanisms are no longer functioning.
Purges in the Name of Efficiency Can Undermine Governance
In several Latin American cases, populist leaders have used anti-corruption rhetoric to justify purges of bureaucratic and judicial institutions. How should scholars distinguish between genuine institutional reform and strategic institutional capture disguised as reform?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: This is a good and difficult question. Reforms are usually justified by these populist leaders who intend to hollow out the state. In the name of government efficiency, you hear these leaders accuse bloated bureaucracy or stress the need to impose austerity regimes and save millions of dollars. You can think of President Javier Milei in Argentina, who began his campaign with a chainsaw in hand, signaling what he intended to do to the state—to institutions he viewed as nonfunctional and unhelpful—and that he wanted to cut bureaucracy and save money.
To determine whether these are genuine institutional reforms, we need to look at the goals and outcomes. Are effective goals achieved, for example, in terms of environmental protections, delivering effective justice, or respecting the rights of minorities? We do not yet have a clear answer, but the state’s capacity to govern, because it is so heavily undermined, will sooner or later affect people when they see that the bureaucracy is not functioning effectively to process their payments, or that judicial institutions are not working properly to hear cases and issue fair sentences.
So, it is in the outcomes and the goals that we will see whether these reforms aimed to enhance government efficiency or were instead a decoy to strengthen, as you said at the beginning, patronage-based networks.
Voters Must Distinguish Performance from Performative Power
Your research highlights the importance of fiscal and administrative capacity. Do populists hollow out states uniformly across sectors, or do they selectively weaken institutions that constrain executive power while strengthening coercive or extractive apparatuses?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: This is one of the questions that deserves more attention. In the article, we discuss the difference between performative and performance-driven reforms and changes. For example, performative actions could include putting hundreds of immigration enforcement agents on the streets to go after so-called illegal immigrants or deploying the military to patrol the streets and target criminals and drug-dealing networks. This obviously has a very strong performative aspect, because public opinion suddenly says, “Oh, wow, the government is doing something.” But what we need to know is whether these measures actually work and what their performance aspect is.
So, yes, there is a paradox in terms of whether the display of force, the display of state strength to address a problem, is in fact effective or merely theatrical. We argue that these truths will become self-evident when midterm elections, local elections, or the next executive election take place and people assess whether those reforms were justified and needed—whether there are, in fact, fewer illegal immigrants or whether crime rates have dropped. What we are seeing so far is that these major displays of force and state strength are not necessarily moving the needle on actual policy outcomes. In Ecuador, over the past two years, under a government with very strong tendencies to use the military and armed forces to combat crime, this has not only failed to move the needle, but crime and homicide rates have actually increased.
It is at this moment, when the performative does not match actual performance, that I would hope voters become aware of this self-evident truth and become less impressed by theatrics and more interested in actual indicators of performance.
Even Consolidated Democracies Can See Institutions Erode Quickly
Many of your empirical insights come from Latin America. How transferable is the “state hollowing” framework to Western democracies, where bureaucratic autonomy and legal constraints are historically stronger?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: I would love to agree with you, and that is my hope—that certainly Western, more consolidated, older democracies have developed stronger bureaucracies, stronger judicial traditions, and stronger financial safeguards to protect against this dismantling or hollowing of the state. I can tell you two diverging stories. In one case, well-established democracies have suddenly seen foreign aid agencies dismantled within months, if not weeks, while budgetary allocations for independent institutions have been either questioned, frozen, or withdrawn. So that believed resilience of state institutions may turn out to be much weaker than assumed. But I think here an important caveat is the role of, coming back again to the democratic level of analysis, the extent to which elections and parties can provide a meaningful counterweight to prevent the executive from dismantling these institutions.
An interesting transitional example—though I am less familiar with continental Europe—is Britain. It has been the case that Britain’s Reform Party (Reform UK), or variations of it, the populist Farage-type movements, have been trying for a long time, at least 10 years, to take over a much broader policy agenda. Partly, institutions, citizens, and democratic practices have contained this drive of a more extreme populist party from gaining much power in Britain. So, we are seeing a level of state resilience and institutional strength by which voters can make this distinction between performative politics and performance and have put back a more moderate Labour government about two years ago.
So, the fact that we observe some state resilience to these populist temptations is good news, but it is not an assurance. It is not a long-term guarantee, particularly if governments come to power and do not deliver the basic minimal governance reforms that people need. There could again be a backlash. This is something we will see over the coming year—whether Labour or another conventional party is able to maintain and safeguard democratic institutions, or whether Reform UK is going to take over and initiate a process that we anticipate would attempt to dismantle essential state institutions and functions in Britain.
Polarization and Legal Manipulation as Gateways to State Erosion
Are contemporary populist movements in Europe and North America reproducing Latin American patterns of institutional erosion, or are they generating a distinct model of democratic decay rooted in polarization and legal manipulation rather than outright state weakening?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: I think there is a similar logic and line of thinking as in the question and in my previous answer. Certainly, this strategy of polarization and legal manipulation serves as an entry point to justify and open the way for further state weakening. So, what we see in Europe and North America is also the temptation to polarize, manipulate legal institutions, weaponize the judiciary, and criticize the media and freedom of expression as a way to entrench power. Whether this leads to outright state weakening will depend on long-standing traditions and on political actors willing to step up and defend the sanctity of the judiciary, the tax bureaucracy, or the defense apparatus.
How do differences in party systems, federalism, and welfare regimes mediate the capacity of populists to capture or erode the state across regions?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: It’s a fantastic question, and it illustrates how much more we need to understand about how, where, and when state erosion works. Certainly, one aspect that we know from the existing literature is that in federal systems, institutional architectures become more resilient than others to state or executive encroachment. State governments, depending on the constitution and their prerogatives and attributions, would have more autonomy to resist. We already saw these dynamics with COVID, when different studies showed how, if the executive had strong policies to prevent the spread of COVID, such as lockdowns and mandatory masks, states would take a different position or opposition. This is different from unitary states, where the reforms and policies adopted by the center ought to be implemented at every step of the way at the local level, and so on.
So, my hope is that strong federalist institutions would be able to withstand and sustain resistance to these temptations of the executive to encroach and further dismantle the state. That is my ideal hope. One thing that we could start observing—and this is an empirical question—is whether we begin to see the formation of vertical coalitions, whereby a populist executive at the federal level combines with a populist executive at the state level. Then you have pillars of state erosion that do not necessarily preserve democracy but rather align with this idea of dismantling state checks and balances and preserving the proliferation of patronage and clientelistic regimes.
Weakened Institutions Enable the Rise of Informal Power Networks
Your broader scholarship emphasizes informal institutions and clientelist linkages. How does the hollowing of formal state institutions reshape the balance between formal governance and informal political networks?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: We argue that state dismantling enhances informality, discretionality, and opacity. So, all the checks, balances, and capacities to oversee, regulate, and ensure representation, etc., are being placed under attack. What we observe with this process of state dismantling is that these trends—dismantling state capacity—further intensify informality, discretionality, and opacity. This has a direct impact on the proliferation of informal political networks. For example, in some countries we can see how tech barons and the owners of the most important technological and media companies have tremendous potential to disrupt and capture any form of regulation in order to maximize profit. So, what I am saying is that when you enhance informality, discretionality, and opacity, the state essentially paves the way for these informal political networks to accomplish their goals and maximize their individual profit, rather than looking out for the common good.
Is there a paradox whereby populist leaders weaken bureaucratic capacity while simultaneously expanding discretionary spending and targeted benefits to maintain political loyalty? What are the long-term developmental consequences of this model?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: Certainly. This is a critical dimension of state capacity that has not received much attention. The literature on democratic backsliding focuses on the dismantling of checks and balances, freedom of expression, and the fairness of political competition, and so forth. But we do not pay enough attention to the fiscal aspect, and one of the instruments used by populists in dismantling state capacity is creating greater discretion in state funding or justifying significant changes in it. For example, I mentioned at the beginning how monies allocated to poverty reduction programs are accounted for and managed. The moment you remove the monitoring and evaluation aspects of that spending; you create a vacuum of discretion where state leaders can allocate those funds for other purposes.
There is a growing trend—one that can be empirically documented—when you look at how much funding for, say, the judiciary has been reduced over time, or how much the state defense apparatus or special police units have discretionary budgets directly connected to the whims of the executive. This is another, less understood mechanism through which spending or targeted benefits can undermine capacity while maintaining political loyalty. Tax exemptions are another case; tax evasion is another. In the book, we mention the case of the current President Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, who not only undermines the capacity of the state collection agency but also creates mechanisms and reforms to secure tax amnesty for his own business group, so that the state revenue-collecting agency forgives the debts of his business groups, and then he appoints one of the top accountants of his business firm to lead the agency.
By the time the executive is handling state collection agencies as if they were the accounting department of his firm, we have come full circle, illustrating how the executive can mismanage spending and benefits to ensure not just political loyalty but the survival of his own coalition.
Performance Failures Can Undermine Hollowed-Out Regimes
Once populist regimes have hollowed out institutional checks, how resilient do these systems become to democratic backlash—whether through elections, protests, or elite defection? Are weakened states paradoxically more durable for incumbents?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: That is certainly the hope—that by weakening the mechanisms for political and democratic participation, state incumbents will become stronger, more embedded, more entrenched, etc. The relevant test here is whether there are scope conditions for stable and durable governance. I go back to the point I mentioned about the performative versus performance-driven type of governance: if the performative outweighs the performance, sooner or later people will feel that their social security checks are not arriving, that they are paying higher prices for the same kinds of goods, or that they feel more insecure on the streets, etc., and this will make incumbent stability much harder to achieve.
So, either populists will need to reconcile this weakening of institutional checks with effective governance, or they will probably go fully autocratic in order to stay in office. But I do not see how this could immediately be a stable equilibrium if leaders continue hollowing out the state and expect to remain in office, unless further action is taken.
Elite Fractures Can Trigger Sudden Regime Collapse
Historical cases show that authoritarian-leaning regimes can collapse suddenly when elite coalitions fracture. What conditions make hollowed-out states vulnerable to reversal versus entrenched in competitive authoritarianism?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: Yes, elite implosion is certainly a possibility, and in a few instances, we have seen countries where top state elites enter into conflict, dispute territories, and dispute alternative versions of budget funding, for example. This would directly undermine the state elite’s ability to survive in office.
My sense is that this has not happened because, collectively, elites have more to gain by sticking together and maintaining the coalition rather than elaborating on their differences. If anything, what could contain this tendency to hollow out states could be outside pressure, as we have seen in the case of Brazilian courts when they issued prison terms for former President Bolsonaro, who aimed to undermine the state, and the courts put a straightforward stop and said this was not feasible. There are also examples from courts in some parts of India, where bureaucracies can offer a containment strategy so that executives find it much harder to encroach on, dismantle, and change institutions.
Another avenue is plebiscites, such as in Ecuador in recent months, where a series of further state reforms to weaken the state were pushed back by voters, who said no in popular consultations, so that these populists could not continue further weakening the state. Internal implosion would be one scenario, but we have to bet on and count on organized pressure from outside to contain this trend.
Democratic Resilience Requires Broad, Cross-Sector Coalitions
And lastly, Professor Acosta, looking ahead, what institutional reforms or societal coalitions offer the most promising pathways to rebuild state capacity and democratic accountability after periods of populist erosion? Do you see reasons for optimism regarding democratic resilience globally?
Assoc. Prof. Andrés Mejía Acosta: I do want to remain optimistic. I do want to see the glass half full in the different events of resistance, rebellion, and reconstruction of democratic capacities. I think this is a much-needed condition for development, for political coexistence, for peace, and respect for human dignity and basic values, etc.
I think, in terms of the specifics of your question—what kinds of societal coalitions or institutional reforms—that this is going to take a much more concerted long-term effort. The challenge now, compared to five or ten years ago, when we were talking about the conditions for democratic resilience and how to contain backsliding, is that we are now talking about the next layer down, as if the authoritarian illness is spreading through the body. It is no longer at the skin or organ level but getting into the bloodstream of how our systems are governed. This requires a much more rapid response on the part of academics to produce more understanding, more nuanced knowledge, and a stronger empirical basis.
But also, activism, non-governmental organizations, educational institutions, the teaching of our students, and the development of broader coalitions around basic rights—of ill people, or unfairly treated people in the court systems, or environmental protections. For that, we need to create cross-cutting coalitions so that, for example, a state attempt to undermine the rights of Indigenous people to preserve their lands from further extraction and exploitation is not just a matter for environmentalists or Indigenous communities, but a cross-societal matter. If we do not collectively defend their rights, sooner or later those attacks from the executive will reach each and every one of us.
So, it is both about developing a cross-sectoral, much broader coalition of different actors—some directly affected, others standing in solidarity with them—and this needs to be long-term. How to do that is a very difficult question that will require most of our innovation, creativity, and commitment. The playing field is also tilted against citizens when social media is controlled by fewer and fewer hands, with dominant discourses prevailing and alternative narratives consistently blocked.
The challenge is much bigger, of course, but the need is also much higher for a sustained, global, broad coalition of interests so that democratic resilience—global democratic resilience—is not just a cause for optimism, but a cause for mobilization and sustained action over time.
